For starters, the feminists got it wrong. In the word "history,"
"his" likely does not refer to men. The American Heritage Dictionary
index of root words shows us that there are astounding relationships
among like-sounding root words. "History" probably comes from
"hyster," the Greek word for "womb.

Why womb? In times gone by, according to my native American
aunties, women were the keepers of histories. Civilization's
"history" starts with family history, and keeping track of the
generations. Men often didn't know who the fathers of children were
-- a thing that a mother was far more likely to know. No generation
was ever skipped. Some native peoples referred to history as "Belts,"
because women wore belts rich in symbols of the long oral histories
they knew. Oral traditions rode on elaborate memory-aid systems that
made sure no child, and no generation, was left out.

In those days, "families" were vast clans, who traded, warred,
intermarried and created culture on a vast scale. Eventually, the
world over, confederacies of related clans who spoke the same
language evolved into nations. Twelve clans came together to form the
nation of Israel. Frankish tribes united to create "France." William
Wallace united the Scot clans against English tyranny. After
thousands of years, China is still clan-conscious, with the Han being
the most numerous.

Today, we have the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered clans
coming together to attempt a single nation, dedicated to the
proposition that not all men and women are not created with the same
kind of sexuality. Yet how real is our own sense of generations
passing? How dedicated are we to keeping track of each and every
child?

In current PC language, it is chic to call ourselves a "tribe" --
and we are actually creating a homosexual version of the heterosexual
unit family. This sounds good in print. But the fact is, often we
talk about "history" without being clear on what we're celebrating
and preserving, or why. Once again Gay and Lesbian History Month
looms ahead, with yet another round of bookstore displays, panel
discussions and media lip service. All too often, that purported
"history" comes from a narrow vision, because of petty political
vendettas and violent disagreements among our community academics.

Seldom, for example, does mention of our "history" include eras
before the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, when drag queens fought back
during a police raid on a downtown Manhattan bar. Starting our
"history" at Stonewall is like starting a U.S. history book in 1776,
omitting three centuries of colonialism and long centuries of native
culture -- to say nothing of visits to the Americas by early European
and Mediterranean peoples, which are usually dismissed as "theory."
Stonewall did not happen like a bolt from the blue! That blaze of
drag-queen spirit was sparked by World War II activists who served in
uniform, who created our first post-war gay and lesbian networks and
publications -- in a time when our people still feared arrest if they
met in tiny political groups at someone's apartment. Yet the PC crowd
don't like to mention our uniformed forebears, because of left-wing
biases against the military. Likewise, Stonewall sprang from a rich
and feisty drag culture with deep roots in the Hispanic and black
communities. Today anti-drag politics in our community makes it hard
for some to acknowledge the important role that drag played in our
pre-Stonewall history.

Even less do we have a sense of "gay and lesbian regional
history." The Northwest, for example, can claim notable pioneers who
deserve greater celebration today -- like playwright Doric Wilson,
who grew up on a ranch in eastern Washington. Doric, who lives
quietly in New York City today, virtually created gay theater in the
1970s, and wrote a body of plays that still ring true in the 1990s.

Generally, our view of "gay and lesbian history" is obsessively
urban, with a gloss of cafe-society glitz. And it's true that we have
a historic pattern of migrating into cities, where we can hide more
easily, and find one another more easily. Yet this narrow view belies
the broad mass of roots that we put down in rural America. There is
rural literature that deserves to be more celebrated, whether
19th-century writings like Willa Cather's "My Antonia", or
contemporary novels like "Common Sons" and "Native", that smell of
earth and open spaces.

With our millennial world so dependent on microchips, it is easy
to forget that those horse-and-buggy days of ours even existed. When
I tell people that the word "punk," used today in men's prisons to
denote a young male sexual partner, was common in old-time ranch
lingo because of sexual relationships among cowboys, people are
always astonished. "I didn't know that!" they say. I grew up on a
ranch in the 1940s, and heard my father, who could remember when
there were few fences in the West, grumbling about this or that
good-looking young "punk" on the ranch...and his meaning was always
clear. Our ranch roots are forgotten by us -- in fact, straight
historians today have chosen to deny the quiet presence of
homosexuality in that old-time cowboy life. We live in a highly
mechanized age when agriculture no longer hires vast armies of
unmarried men on horseback, so it is all too easy to "not
understand."

"History" is terrifyingly vulnerable to denial. If one grandmother
sweeps a family secret under the rug, or never shares her stories
with her grandchildren, the family's picture of itself is skewed. In
my own family, the truth about intermarriage with blacks and native
Americans was kept hidden for several generations, till my brother
and I ferreted out the truth. On a national level, if you silence or
kill the person who has the vital information, or burn the historical
archive full of documents, you have hacked a limb from the living
body of history.

This vulnerability was used by government and missionaries to
destroy the old sense of history among conquered tribes on the
19th-century reservations. It was "pagan history," so it was "bad"
and deserved to be forgotten. Belt-keepers who had the information
were silenced. Only white man's history was acceptable in the new
reservation schools. Brown-skinned children learned of George
Washington instead of Crazy Horse and Quetzalcoatl. In just two or
three generations, only a fragmented picture of history remained for
20th-century tribal members to share with each other. Native people
have had to re-invent their history -- ironically finding themselves
dependent on bits and pieces recorded by early white anthropologists,
mostly Christians who didn't have a clue about the pagan world-view
that underlay the old native chronicles, or what the old symbols
meant.

"History" is highly vulnerable to single acts of arson. In the
1960s, as the (then) Soviet Union experienced its first stirrings of
liberalization, the dominant Russians so feared nationalistic
stirrings in Ukraine that one day a mysterious fire broke out in the
main historical library of Kiev, capital of Ukraine. That archive
contained documents going back to the early Middle Ages, when Slavic
clans came together to form the Ukrainian people. For days the fire
burned out of control. Everybody knew it was arson. Not a single fire
engine came -- the city government had to answer to Moscow. The
library burned to the ground. With the information gone, Moscow hoped
that Ukrainians would have no basis for arguments that they deserved
cultural autonomy within the U.S.S.R. This arson was not even
reported in the Western press, who were busy trying to keep detente
with the USSR.

Try to imagine the Vatican Library burning to the ground, and the
fire's impact on the Catholic Church. Try to imagine the Library of
Congress being destroyed, and the impact on Americans. Then try to
imagine the loss of Morris Kight's archive, or the archive at One
Institute in L.A., or the Homosexual Information Center in Louisiana,
or Joan Nestle's Herstory archives in New York. We already suffered
the loss of the immense Berlin archive of gay and lesbian history,
including manuscripts of Socrates and Sappho, that was burned by the
Nazis.

Homosexual history is even more vulnerable than heterosexual
history. For most of our thousands of years in the West, we HAVE
lived underground. The persecution of newly conquered native peoples,
the threats to the survival and integrity of their histories, has
been our daily fact for generations. Today our U.S. archives are few,
and most of them limp along on tiny budgets, in locations that are
often far from adequate. Our library collections are few in number.
Yet every old paperback of lesbian pulp fiction, every yellowed men's
magazine, or newsletter on bisexual organizing, or Web page of
transgendered networking -- each and every box of documents, tape
recording and CD is important. Losing most of my own personal
archives in the 1994 Northridge Quake -- old manuscripts and letters
and memorabilia -- taught me the frailty of my own "past". All the
more reason why we, like the Belt-keepers of old, should be careful
to count each and every "child".

"History's" greatest achilles heel is that history books can and
do get re-written by the winners of wars. The Bible itself was
rewritten by different church councils, who took things out and put
things in. Ongoing archeological discovery of "lost" manuscripts
hidden in jars in desert caves, show that our idea of those
"biblical" times is far from complete. The Catholic Church wrote
pagans out of European history once Charlemagne had conquered Europe.
Before the 1960s, Christian white Americans wrote non-white
immigrants and pagan native peoples out of U.S. history books. The
gay community is no different. All the more reason why the winners of
our own ideological wars should not misuse their positions of power
at universities or in the media to tamper with our own history.

We are far too prone to kowtow to straight celebrities who support
us, even to rewrite our own history on their behalf. At this writing,
Princess Diana has been dead only two weeks, yet I already see
statements in the gay press that she helped "pioneer AIDS awareness."
With all respect for Diana's compassion about AIDS patients, she was
no "pioneer." Neither was Elizabeth Taylor, who is now being toppled
from her pioneer pedestal so Diana can be put there. The real
pioneers -- like publicist Tyler St. Mark, who created the first AIDS
awareness campaign in 1983, long before Liz ever jumped on the
bandwagon -- are mostly vanished from the record.

Gay people who attack the memories of colleagues they don't
approve of, are like those vindictive priests in ancient Egypt who
went around chiseling the names of out-of-favor kings and queens out
of temple inscriptions. We should not efface the record of any clan
within our own confederated lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered
nation, even though we may not agree with them politically. Much as I
disapprove of NAMBLA, for example, I would never help burn their
library. They -- and the hot controversies around sex between adults
and minors -- are undeniably part of our history, the way polygamy is
part of Mormon history, the way slavery is part of American history.

Today our young people -- high school and college age -- enter the
community with minds and memories that are understandably blank of
any sense of our long history. Few among straight parents, straight
educators, straight media will teach them a single iota of anything
positive about our contributions to history. As censorship becomes
more a fact of American life, they are less and less likely to hear
that Walt Whitman was gay, that Eleanor Roosevelt was bisexual, that
homosexuals died in Nazi death camps, or that transgendered people
enjoyed an extraordinary respect among many native tribes. Again and
again, when I lecture in schools, I have seen kids' faces light up as
they hear about Stonewall and all that went before.

"Cool...I didn't know that!" they say.

That newborn sense of history, whether in a tortured underground
or the occasional spotlight of fame and leadership -- helps our youth
to know they are not alone. I vividly remember the reaction of a gay
teen activist who had just discovered the existence of an exciting
era of ancient history called the Sixties. I told him about Bayard
Rustin, black gay Quaker who helped Martin Luther King construct the
black rights movement of the Sixties. He devoured a book I gave him,
which (ironically) was from a Quaker publisher, not a gay publisher.
Today our historiographers mostly turn up their noses at Rustin
because (in their view) he was not "out" by today's lofty standards.
But this teen activist leaped beyond this judgmental kind of PC
nonsense. He had an excited appreciation of Rustin's courage and
contribution.

Knowing their real history is a powerful way for young people to
combat their fear that they are the only queer kid on Earth. The
recent suicide of Utah teen activist Jacob Orozco, who took his own
life after two years of battling for student freedoms in Utah
schools, is a sign that we still have a long way to go.

The history we give to our youth must be COMPLETE. "World
history," whether it's the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Belts of my native
forebears, provides us with searing examples of what's real and what
isn't, both in written records and in a civilization's unwritten yet
powerful sense of itself, as transmitted to its children. To survive
into the 21st century, the gay community will need a powerful will to
remember and a powerful respect for every single child in every
generation behind us.

Patricia Nell Warren authored The Front Runner and its sequels
Harlan's Race and the forthcoming Billy's Boy. Also a commentator and
youth advocate, she lives in Los Angeles, where she serves on the Gay
and Lesbian Education Commission of the Los Angeles Unified School
District.